A DEPUTY speaker of the House of Representatives has threatened the Bureau of Customs with a zero budget. Wouldn’t that be like killing the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg?
The BOC is one of the two biggest contributors to the national treasury, the other being the Bureau of Internal Revenue. If one of these two agencies fails to function, the entire government machinery, including Congress which is an expense, not a revenue, center, will surely bog down.
And what has the BOC done to earn the congressional threat of extinction? Because, said the deputy speaker, bureau officials failed to satisfactorily explain why 600 kilograms of shabu were able to enter the country without being detected.
That is the official line and, under ordinary circumstances, it does resonate. The bureau has a reputation for being graft-ridden and it would not be difficult to believe that the contraband managed to enter the country with the help, or at the very least, through the negligence of customs men.
But the threat came at the same hearing where congressmen took turns berating a customs official for calling their speaker “imbecile” and that is what makes the motive suspect. Don’t mess with the boss or there’s hell to pay, that seems to be the message.
Actually, what lawyer Mandy Anderson said pales in comparison to the utterances made by the congressmen themselves in many public hearings, notably in the one on Sen. Leila de Lima. And if you consider President Duterte’s habitual resort to colorful language (an understatement), the adjective that she used is tame.
But Anderson is not a congressman but an ordinary government functionary and there lies the difference. Jurisprudence and the constitution favor her enjoyment of the freedom of expression but that apparently matters little, if at all, to an offended Congress, who, not content with bullying her, now propose to starve her employer to death.
In the words of Cassius, the fault, dear Mandy, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.
u2022••
The circumstances surrounding the killing of Ozamiz City Mayor Reynaldo Parojinog, along with his wife, his brother and at least 13 others are likely to raise a lot of questions from some quarters. Why was it preceded by a power outage? Why were the closed circuit TV cameras turned off? If Parojinog’s supporters fired first, presumably from a vantage point, at the policemen why were there no casualties among them save for one who was slightly injured?
Let’s just hope that the police have learned their lesson and have credible answers to these questions. It would be unfortunate if the unrelenting war against drugs that the President Duterte promised in his last State of the Nation Address and which enjoys wide public support, would again be hounded by accusations of extrajudicial killings.